This page provides presentations and supplementary materials related to a 2008 conference marking the conclusion of a project on ‘Youth Exclusion and Political Violence’ co-funded by the World Bank ‘Trust Fund for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development’ (TFESSD) and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The project sought to identify ways to break the adverse relationship between youth bulges (large youth cohorts), marginalization, and political violence, and to engage large youth cohorts positively in development.

The aim of the conference was to discuss advances in the research on youth and political violence in relation to developmental policies targeted towards youth inclusion, such as education reform, social protection, employment programs, urban development strategies, micro credit schemes and reintegration programs for displaced youth or former combatants. At-risk youth in Sub-Saharan Africa were a particular focus.

The conference was co-organized by the Africa Fragile States, Conflict and Social Development Unit of the World Bank and the Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW) at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO).

The LAC Development Marketplace & Knowledge Exchange Forum will be held in Washington D.C on January 14 to 15. It will showcase finalists from the World Bank’s 2010 Development Marketplace Grant Competition, which identifies and funds innovative, early-stage projects with high potential for development impact. This year’s theme is Youth Developing Opportunity: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Sustainability, in the Latin America and the Caribbean region.

This event will include the following:

• Showcase of projects by Finalists
• Selection of Winners and Presentation of Award
• Capacity Building events and Exchanges
• Networking and Open Space Opportunities
• Working Sessions between the Finalists, Service Providers and DM Partners.

To find out more about this event, and the grant competition, follow the link below.

Development Marketplace (DM) is a competitive grant program administered by the World Bank and supported by various partners that identifies and funds innovative, early-stage projects with high potential for development impact. This year’s theme is Youth Developing Opportunity: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Sustainability, in the Latin America and the Caribbean region.

This competition recognizes innovation across this spectrum, and will reward projects that focus on reducing poverty, enriching lives and generating productive, healthy citizens. A central focus of this competition will therefore be on ideas that have the potential to create employment for young people and bring associated benefits to communities and society at large.

The awardees will have programs that are youth-led and/or youth-focused in the following areas:

• The commercialization of locally produced biodiversity and agricultural products without degrading source habitats.
• Innovative approaches to income generating opportunities for young people living in poor urban areas that are “hot spots” of crime and violence
• Social and economic initiatives that contribute to the well-being of vulnerable groups

Since the goal is to fund innovation in youth-focused development, grants will be given to projects in either the pilot stage (5,000-15,000 dollars), or the scale-up stage (20,000-35,000 dollars). Find out more about eligibility and the DM by following the link below.

Finalists for this grant competition will present at the LAC Development Marketplace & Knowledge Exchange Forum, an event meant to showcase exemplary projects and provide a forum for networking and sharing knowledge.

The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation’s primary goal is to support and initiate programs that directly serve the needs of children living in urban poverty. Their focus areas are education, childhood health, and family economic stability through microfinance.

Currently, most of their funding for economic initiatives is focused on projects in urban India, while African funding focuses on childhood health. This regional/sectoral focus is not an official requirement in their application process, but priority is given to projects that align with the Foundation’s geographic and sectoral focus areas.

To learn more, see the foundation’s FAQs.

Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis. Apply using the link below.

The USAID-funded Community Action Program (CAP) III builds upon the successes of CAP I and II in strengthening local government institutions and grassroots democracy in Iraq. ACDI/VOCA and its sub-partner, International City/County Management Association (ICMA), are implementing CAP III in four of Iraq’s northern provinces: Kirkuk, Salah ad Din, Diyala and Ninawa. The goal of CAP III is to increase the ability of local government to identify, articulate and better meet the needs of its constituency.

The program’s objectives are:

• Communities better articulate their needs and mobilize resources within and outside the community to solve common problems;
• Local executive and representative government in CAP communities better meet articulated needs of the community; and
• Civilian victims of conflict assisted by the Marla Ruzicka Innocent Victims of War Fund.

Meeting the needs of local youth is important to achieving these objectives, so CAP III incorporates several youth components:

• Apprenticeship Programs for Youth in Private/Public Sector
  The Apprenticeship Program was designed and implemented under the previous CAP programs to improve youth workforce capacity in areas of high youth unemployment. The apprenticeship program currently provides short-term jobs in combination with on-the-ground training for over 460 youth between 18 and 24 years old who are graduates of technical institutes and universities.
  
  Under CAP III, supervisors are being trained in how to mentor and coach apprentices, which improves employers’ human resource management. This addresses the needs of youth in the community, and also has the benefit of strengthening human resource capacity within the local government, which will be critical as local government becomes more decentralized. In addition, CAP III is introducing an apprenticeship program targeted at public health outreach. Through this program, young graduates, will assist health specialists in developing outreach and training materials targeting maternal and child health, water-borne diseases, and other community-identified critical public health issues.
  
  
• Youth Civic Action and Governance Summer Camps
  ACDI/VOCA will conduct two Youth Civic Action and Governance Summer camps for a total of 120 youth in the summer of 2009. The camps will bring together male and female youth from all four provinces who represent diverse ethnicities to engage them in activities that will teach community governance strategies through active simulation and participation. Through the camps, youth will be exposed to both diversity and commonalities among themselves, and they will learn how to effectively use conflict-mitigation strategies, team-building, and advocacy strategies as responsible citizens.
  
  
• Development of Youth Community Action Groups (CAGs)
  Under CAP II, the Quratoo Community Action Group in northern Diyala developed a strong focus on advocating for youth issues and developing youth leadership. It formed a Youth Action CAG, predominantly composed of men and women under 30 years of age who work in the public sector as teachers and government employees, to support and inform its work with and for young people. Currently, the Quratoo CAG focuses on promoting and advocating youth leadership to their sub-district council and higher levels of government.

Brandie Maxwell
bmaxwell@acdivoca.org

October 2008 - March 2010

This policy on post-conflict employment creation, income generation and reintegration provides a UN approach built around a common set of guiding principles and programming guidelines. It underlines the necessity of coherent and comprehensive strategies for post-conflict employment promotion and reintegration, and always includes the three programming tracks below. While all three tracks promote employment, their focus is different. The tracks focus respectively on stabilization, on return and reintegration opportunities, and on long-term employment creation. While programmes in these tracks start at the same time and as early as possible, their intensity during the recovery phase generally peaks at different times:

• Track A for stabilizing income generation and emergency employment: this track of employment programmes aims to consolidate security and stability, targeting conflict-affected individuals and groups;
• Track B for local economic recovery for employment and reintegration: this track of employment programmes focuses on promoting employment opportunities at the local level, where reintegration ultimately takes place; and
• Track C for sustainable employment creation and decent work: this track involves support to policies, institutional capacity building at the national level and creating a framework for social dialogue to define the rules of the game by consensus.

The policy notes that “creating youth employment that taps into the positive energy and skills of youth is a particularly difficult challenge, as youth often find themselves trapped in a vicious cycle of violence, poverty, illiteracy and social exclusion,” and provides guidance on youth employment in Annex 1. Annex 2 addresses the gender challenges of post-conflict employment and advocates for a household well-being focus in employment programs.

Tanzania’s urban areas do not have formalized systems for the disposal of used plastic bottles and bags. Piles of plastic waste accumulate in waterways and along streets in neighborhoods across Dar es Salaam, creating breeding environments for malaria-carrying mosquitos, allowing unsafe chemical seepage into water sources and soils, and developing generally unsanitary conditions in dense urban areas. To address environmental impacts of plastic use and production in Dar es Salaam and provide youth with simple after-school income-generating activities and training in personal and environment health management, EcoVentures International (EVI) and the Environmental Enterprise Development Initiative (EEDI), a coalition of cross-sectoral local organizations originally organized by EVI, worked together on a basic value chain assessment of the plastics recycling industry.

There are several plastics companies in Dar es Salaam manufacturing plastic shoes, buckets, and fences. Until 2005, these plastics companies imported the virgin plastic inputs for the manufacturing process. The EVI/EEDI assessment highlighted micro and small enterprise opportunities for unemployed youth in processing used plastics for recycling and reuse in the local plastics industry. An EEDI partner, Environment Based Poverty Alleviation, established a start-up enterprise for plastics collection and recycling, beginning by working with a few older jobless youths sourcing plastics from dump sites.

In order to reach the large volumes of plastics demanded, the enterprise tapped into the youth population to provide them with an easy way to contribute to the clean-up of their community, instilling a sense of social responsibility, and to generate income in a way that would not interfere with school activities. Youth are trained in basic protective health and sanitation skills and provided with protective equipment to use when doing their individual collection.

As the enterprise develops it has been able to take advantage of relationships with key market actors and grow its operations, first by contracting trucks to transport the plastic to a sorting facility. Financing from plastics manufacturers who used the lower-cost recycled plastic product facilitated investment into recycling equipment and expanded their capacity for production of recycled plastic pellets that had even more value to the plastics manufacturers in the region. The recycling enterprise has retooled its business model to make plastics processing and pelletization its primary function, and it continues to contract a network of youth plastics collectors to feed the demand for plastic waste while providing an important service of removing harmful waste plastics from communities, enabling youth to create a safer community while contributing to their own and their families’ well-being.

Kate Davenport
kate@eco-ventures.org

In October 2007, USAID’s Displaced Children and Orphans Fund, in close collaboration with the Microenterprise Development office, initiated the STRIVE (Supporting Transformation by Reducing Insecurity and Vulnerability with Economic Strengthening) Program. A five-year, $16 million effort, STRIVE uses market-led economic strengthening initiatives to benefit vulnerable children. In doing so, the program aims to fill current knowledge gaps on effective approaches to reducing the vulnerability of children and youth.

Managed by the Academy for Educational Development (AED) in concert with technical advisors from Action for Enterprise, ACDI/VOCA, CARE, MEDA, Save the Children, the IRIS Center and USAID, STRIVE is implementing up to five field projects in Africa and Asia between 2008 and 2012. Each project is pursuing a unique economic strengthening approach, ranging from savings-led finance to workforce development to value chain interventions. STRIVE is tracking and documenting the impacts of these diverse interventions on child-level indicators related to both economic (financial), and non-economic (e.g. health, nutrition, education) vulnerability factors. As a result, STRIVE aims to identify and demonstrate interventions that can sustainably increase incomes and document how such increases improve (or fail to improve) the lives of children.

• Afghanistan: Secure Futures (ASF), AED and MEDA

• Liberia: Agriculture for Children's Empowerment (ACE), ACDI/VOCA
• Mozambique: STRIVE Mozambique, Save the Children US
• Philippines: STRIVE Philippines, Action for Enterprise (AFE)
• STRIVE Monitoring and Evaluation, The IRIS Center

Margie Brand
STRIVE Program Director
AED
Center for Enterprise and Capacity Development
1825 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20009
USA
margie@eco-ventures.org